Even if the free TV is broken, who can say “no” to it? This was the case last year when Andrew Menadue received the LG 39le4900 LCD TV. As [Andrew] described in his blog post and video (see the first part embedded after the break), this particular TV was taken to a TV repair shop after the HDMI input stopped working, but due to the lack of replacement parts, the owner had to repair it while the analog input was still working. That is, until they also stop working.
The advantage of these TVs is that their interiors are very modular, and Andrew is happy to find this. In addition to LG controller board, inverter board and power board, this TV also includes a TCON PCB. After replacing some parts with eBay’s substitutes, it didn’t succeed (surprisingly) at first, but it turned out that TCON and frequency converter board were manufactured and sold by AUO (the main display manufacturer in Taiwan), as well as the display itself.
The results show that both the AUO board and the screen are very good. After finding a board to convert the VGA input into the LVDS signal received by the TCON board, the whole display works normally. Of course, it would be nice to use a circuit board with HDMI input, but it does show how a “broken” TV can easily become a really beautiful large display if it is just a controller circuit board failure.